In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State

Charles Murray proposed a plan to eliminate all welfare transfer programs at the federal, state, and local levels, and substitute a $10,000 annual cash grant to everyone age 21 or older. Sound too good to be true? The book describes the financial feasibility of the plan and its effects on retirement, health care, poverty, marriage and family, work effort, vocations, neighborhoods, and civil society. In Our Hands will help us to sweep out the intellectual cobwebs and come to grips with a truth that somehow has been ignored in all the hand-wringing about budget deficits and shortages of money: It is absurd that the government can spend so much money on poverty, health care, and retirement, and accomplish so little. While an obvious audience will be people on the right, libertarian and conservative, In Our Hands will also appeal to those on the left who are serious about getting more resources into the hands of the poor. It will also challenge the left to confront its own rhetoric about the disadvantaged. If it is not a good idea to give real resources and responsibility to them, why not?